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I recently accepted a position from Teach and Learn with Georgia, a Georgian Ministry of Education program designed to bring native speakers of English into classrooms around the country. I will be moving to Georgia in August of 2014 to begin my assignment.

Before this latest adventure, I studied at Bogazici University in Istanbul Turkey and at Azerbaijan University of Languages. I speak English German Spanish, Turkish Azerbaijani and Uzbek and am currently trying my hand at Georgian.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

The Johnnies and the Mehmets

View from "The Neck", one center of the Gallipoli engagement

Battlefields shouldn’t be beautiful. At least this is how I
feel. Battlefields should be cold and gray and melancholy. You shouldn’t look
out and think “man, what a great beach”, or “wow, what a fantastic view”. Human
beings refuse to fight over the truly ugly parts of the world though and so we
are constantly forced to face beautiful battlefields, looking at a breathtaking
vista and looking down to find graves at your feet, men of 19 and 20 whose
lives ended with that view. My brain always short circuits at this point as it
tries to rectify how the ugliness of man made destruction could coexist with the
natural splendor of the place. I’m never going to win though and so I just
consume the paradox and move on.

The cemetery at the first ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Auxiliary Corps) landing site Ari Burnu

I tried to imagine the fields a sea of dirt and dust, bodies
and blood, but I cannot. I see the green pines and shrubs and remember the swaths
of electric yellow that surrounded the motorway on either side of the road to
Eceabat. My mind cannot comprehend the horror of trench warfare. And I don’t
think I want it to. Many of the graves that exist today are “presumed to be
buried here”. No one knows. Many names do not even get a headstone, just a line
carved into a stone monument, standing mute, each one identical to the other on
spots throughout the landscape. Tiny scraps of land that men fought viciously
over, pouring hot metal and fire into a football field’s worth of no man’s land
before launching themselves towards a goal that they knew the first attackers
could not possibly reach. Many of these maneuvers were ‘diversionary’, meant
only to distract attention. Men dying for an optical illusion, a sleight of hand,
while other men fought just as hard and died just as quickly for the ‘real’
objective, another slice of land in the Aegean, wafer thin ridges on a skinny
peninsula for a vein of maritime property that would bring the allies to
Russian waters.

Brighton Beach, where the ANZACs were meant to land on 25 April 1915

There’s a quote by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk about the Battle of
Gallipolli that I find incredibly poetic. He wrote it 20 years after the
fighting, and nearly 80 years ago and it still strikes me as one of the most
chivalrous, courageous and simply heart wrenching things I have ever
heard.I leave you with it.

Those heroes that shed
their blood and lost their lives; – You are now living in the soil of a
friendly country, – therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the
Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country
of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries – wipe
away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom, – and are in peace.
After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

I graduated from Michigan State University in 2014 with degrees in chemistry, anthropology and Turkic languages. When not out globetrotting, I can be found perched in front of my laptop, sharing my adventures with you.